Gender and culture Module 2

course “gender and culture”

module 2 – feminism and knowledge

Introduction and transition from module one

This course, in one sense, revisits the ‘and’ in
“gender and culture”, and the overlap of these categories in understanding work
for feminism in India.
Are these – gender and culture – different standpoints or analytic categories
that help us understand work for feminism in India? Do these reside in happy
coalition, as the ‘and’ might suggest, or do they speak different, and
antagonistic languages? What have been the implications of these two terms/
categories in the various gender-culture debates that have populated the
women’s movement and feminist theorizing in India? What have been the overlaps
between the terms/ categories? What has been the ‘place of woman’ in
theorizations of culture?

To get to this
point, we might look at the registers that research into each of these
categories has occupied. Culture, in
the overarching presence of the colonial ‘then’, and of the ‘global’ now,[1] is
a politicized term, with many connotations – Indianness, heterogeneity,
niché, locality – to name a few. The work of studying culture – through
history, through literature, through the impact of postcolonial work on these
and other disciplines – has partly been to mix frankly political terms with
those not so obviously part of the political lexicon (like the ‘private
sphere’, for instance) and thus to makeculture a political term – one
constituted through various other entities, gender among them. Some of
this work has been detailed in the first module of this course.

Feminism, on the other hand, that
undertakes research into issues of gender, has ‘naturally’ stood for the
political in the popular consciousness, and, significantly, in intellectual
work, including work in women’s studies departments. With specific reference to
the Indian context, the feminist slogans - “The personal is the political”, or
“Women’s studies is a perspective, not a discipline”, come to mind for the
significant ways in which they have shaped feminist thinking and teaching in
India. We could see, in a closer examination of these slogans, the ways in
which feminism as critique both of mainstream knowledgesystems andpolitical narratives gets shaped around such a notion of the ‘naturally’
political. Given this, feminism would make possible a political critique of
epistemology, but would not wish to work toward an epistemology of its own.

In
centering this module around an ‘ism’ in the shape of feminism, we deliberately
take up the political question of gender but differently from the above. In
centering this module around an ‘ism’ yet wishing to propose a movement out of
‘isms’, we might actually interrupt the conventional register of the political
– a register that recognizes feminism as ‘naturally’, and as only, political.
By doing so, this module introduces the question of feminism as knowledge, not
in a movement away from politics but more significantly, as a productive and
perhaps necessary connection between the political and the epistemological.

Keeping these points in mind, this
module seeks to ask the following questions for feminism –

·
Is feminism about producing knowledge,
or is feminism about a political critique of universalist knowledge and
systems of knowledge? Are the two activities – critique and
knowledge-production – separable?

·
In other words, is “feminist knowledge”
about pointing to the empirical and conceptual exclusions on which first order
theories stand – a more naturally political task – or does it have a ‘positive’
epistemological content of its own? What might that be?

·
Talking more of positive content, if
feminist knowledge is a possibility,
is it important to ask - “who knows”? Is such a question a sufficient movement
away from “universalist knowledge” that presumes there is only one knowledge,
one way of getting to it, and that it is true for all as well as for all time?

·
If feminism were to suggest, as an
alternative to universalism, ‘situatedness’ as a condition for knowledge, what
would be meant by such situatedness?

·
In traditional thinking, a statement is
made about a linear relationship between women and feminism. Are women
therefore situated knowers? How would we, in the present, respond to such a
statement?

·
Would this response be a movement away
from older understandings of the political, and of feminism as its natural
home? In other words, would this be a movement away from feminism as an ‘ism’
or ideology (“the
set of ideas which arise from a given set of material interests” [Williams
1976:128-9])? If so, how?

·
Would culture be such a situation of
knowledge-making? Would such a knowledge-making ask questions of
culture-as-knowledge?

·
Going back to the first question, if
feminism is about critique as well as about knowledge-making, would such
knowledge be a liberatory tool, or, Frankenstein-like, carry its own demands of
the knower? What would the elements of the knowledge produced through such an
understanding look like?

One
– introduction – feminism and the
political

Both culture
and gender have been vantage points for the critique of the universal character
granted to knowledge; a specific example of this would be the response to the
apparently universalist character of Western science in Indian contexts. In
talking about gender as a vantage point, we need to bear in mind how feminism
as critique both of mainstream knowledgesystems andpolitical
narratives gets shaped around a notion of the ‘naturally’ political. To
understand this would require an examination of self-perceptions of feminism in
various spaces and political contexts. The specific instance of feminism in India will be taken up for discussion in this
section – how feminism as the natural home for the ‘political’ begins to be
articulated in both feminist activism and intellectualizing in India.

Readings
–

Denise Riley.

Rosemary Tong
on an overview of 2nd wave feminism.

Christopher
caudwell on a bourgeois philosophy.

Raka Ray – Fields
of Protest.

Exercise –

Examine the
trajectory of the relationship between “the personal and the political” in
Marxist and feminist writing.

A discussion
on the two slogans - “The personal is the political”, and “Women’s studies is a
perspective, not a discipline”.

Two
– experience and
women/ women and feminism– traditional ties.

This section
will elaborate on the ways in which feminism as a world-view has been attached
to women, and how this tie has contributed to critiques of universalist
knowledge. The notions of the everyday/ the personal/ the experiential, which
are seen as the world of women in
patriarchy, have been re-activated largely in 2nd wave feminism
in order to critique dominant knowledge forms. Among the many forms this has
taken, two will be discussed – one, feminism as expected to begin from and
therefore be representative of women; two, feminism as attached to exploring
the ontic question “woman”. Examples of efforts in this direction include on
the one hand the movement toward uncovering women [thus bringing women into
visibility], on the other hand movements like ecriture feminine or
ecofeminism or prakriti [thus activating an alternative symbolic or
‘world’ that may be named feminine]. Thus the effort of feminist work has been
to point to the conceptual and empirical exclusions on which first order
theories stand. Such work has permeated feminist takes on literature, history,
as well as theory.

Readings
–

Margaret
Whitford on Irigaray. The Feminine in Philosophy.

Butler
– Introduction to Bodies That Matter.

Vandana
Shiva.

Possible
exercise –

Examine
women’s studies publications from an Indian or other university.

Or

Syllabi of
gender paper.

Note
– the point of this module is not to cut the
link between women and feminism but to examine the ways in which it has been
established.

Three
– feminism and experience – traditional
ties

This section
will examine roughly three ways in which feminism in India has called upon women’s
experience in order to challenge dominant political formations as well as
dominant, propositional models of knowledge production culturally embedded in
what is called the ‘West’. These ways move from the application of feminism as
ideology to critique universalist knowledge systems, to that of women as
directly confronting such systems and making their own contingent negotiations
with both power and knowledge. This last part of the section actually examines
ways in which the women-feminism link was challenged through such work. The
three approaches to be discussed are –

-
The
global universalist approach that
concerns itself with gender and culture, that wants to work with an
attention to women everywhere and from every culture, that believes in “one”
knowledge but is concerned with its access by women of all cultures. Martha C. Nussbaum,
who sees her work as an example of feminist political philosophy, is the best
example of this approach.

-
The local, soliloquous approach that takes modern science or western
forms of knowledge to be by definition violent, reductionist, and capitalist,
with an exclusionary attitude to the experiences of women in the third world,
and therefore advocates a return to the third world women-nature combine as a
response.

-
Global
gender work disdaining the universalist approach - this
works toward identifying moments of resistance – arbitrary and non-ideological
- in women’s lives. This approach is in alignment with postcolonial thinking
that works within a framework of hybridity.

Readings–

Martha C.
Nussbaum.

Cecilia van
Hollen.

Vandana
Shiva.

Possible
exercise –

An
examination of posters from the reproductive health movement, available at and
to be collected from hospital clinics.

Four
– experience and
knowledge – traditional binaries

The discussions in
the last section bring us to the classical science-experience binary that has
been the pillar of most critiques – including feminist – of universalist forms
of knowledge. Both gender and culture have been used as the experiential
question to the ‘reasonableness’ of western models of knowledge. The work
around culture seen in postcolonial writings, and the Marxist legacies of
feminist thinking in India,
demonstrate this approach. Such a binary, of experience versus knowledge, that
informs both culture and gender critiques of western knowledge forms, undergoes
further adjectivization – third world experience versus western reason, third
world women’s experience versus western reason, and so on, thus assembling
gender and culture as similar vantage points for critique – an argument that in
itself we might find ourselves in disagreement with. It is such a legacy that
ultimately also informs the feminist drawing on women’s experience to counter
Reason that has in turn been adjectivized as male. One of the chief areas where
Reason is said to underpin language and policy is mainstream development
frameworks, and it is here that feminism in India, among other critiques, has
made some of its more forceful argument. It says that the underpinning of
mainstream development practice is provided by the language and practice of
(modern western) science, which assumes the following: knowledge and subsequent
use of knowledge is independent of both knower and the user; therefore the
object of knowledge is an entity produced in detachment, which is then
disseminated through a top-down method. In this frame, questions of context are
to be factored in only as empirical criteria, and not as constitutive of the
object of knowledge. Of course, this model ignores the contexts that moor its
own knowledge frames.[2] An
essentialist understanding of “woman” is what feminism seeks to debunk here,
when using this critique against western medical texts, for instance.

In the case
of culture, critiques of western knowledge frames arising from such a vantage
point have often been an accessing of a notion of pre-existing, anterior
knowledge system – one that might be called Indian, for instance. Although
cultural critiques have also, like feminism, attempted to challenge the
Orientalist notions of other locales that infect western knowledge of the same,
the critiques themselves fall back, through various means, on such an anterior,
timeless context that must needs resist universalist knowledge.

Possible
exercise –

1. Bring to the classroom any instances of
your consultations with an allopathic doctor at a clinic.

Discussion
based on the same.

2. Bring to the classroom 2 instances of
consultations with a practitioner of any health system other than allopathy.

Discussion
based on the same.

Five
– relevance of feminism as an ideology to
counter universal knowledge?

Having
charted the workings of the knowledge-experience binary in feminist critiques
in the last section, we come to the question of a certain disaggregation that
now takes up the space of critique. Such a disaggregation not only concentrates
on the local, the micro, it actually challenges the relevance of a coherent set
of interests that may resist a dominant scheme. In other words, does feminism
as a coherent ideology make sense any more? This section will discuss ways in
which feminism – the naturally political space – began to be countered as the
critique of universalist knowledge, being replaced by more ‘micro’,
on-the-ground understandings of the political, and of power in general. The
third approach brought up in section three – that of global gender work – to
women’s experience as critique of universalist knowledge exemplifies this
shift, and will be discussed in more detail.

Six - feminism as knowledge – a possible
world.

This section
takes up three questions. One, if feminist knowledge is a possibility,
does that entail a move away from experience? Two, if feminist knowledge
is a possibility, and if it is intimately related to the question of critique
as well, is it enough to identify “who knows”? What could be more valid
criteria for situatedness? Three, if feminist knowledge is a
possibility, would such knowledge be liberating or empowering in the ways in
which knowledge has traditionally known to be?

The old ideological model of critique was also tied to a model of
knowledge, a model that said – I know,
you do. For a feminism having drawn from Marxist legacies of politics, this
was the model to be adopted, and the politics around
women’s lives that gave birth to this entity, feminism, and has nurtured it
ever since, definitionally became that benevolent umbrella, that liberatory
tool, that protects those lives and inserts itself into them (suggesting that
the personal must be politicized). This model called for a feminism that needed
only to champion the entry of the empirically excluded – hence the innumerable
women-in-science enclaves, the talk of the glass ceiling, the push toward
inclusion. Having identified the problems of vanguardism during the
post-nationalist, subaltern turn, however, a portion of the rethinking Leftand a
global, universalist feminism may consider that what remains for us to do or
think is a turn to experience. The slogan changed; it became – we all know, together. Nussbaum’s global
approach to the local, discussed in section three, takes this position. Both
these moves were, however, hyphenated in the premise of ‘one knowledge’. There
was another move – critical of ‘one knowledge’, and carrying a different slogan
– I know mine, you know yours, there can
be no dialogue. For this school, exemplified in ecofeminism discussed in
section three, the experience of oppression was necessary, and sufficient, to
make this claim. The consciousness of oppression, which was the ex-officio
result of belonging to the community, offered knowledge. The community of
knowers here was a closed community. Asserting that the ‘one knowledge’ claim
rested on the active exclusion of other knowledges, it suggested a remaking of
‘low knowledge’ through the experience of
oppression. This is the impulse that starts, and ends, with
the embodied insider, speaking with[in] and for itself, a complete closed
community. This impulse we have seen with respect to sexual minorities, caste,
women, the subaltern – an impulse also tied to the organic or pastoral as
opposed to the technological, an impulse sometimes tracing direct connections
with a cultural past, and often offering a choice between systems of knowledge.

In the complex of
phenomena often referred to by the short-hand ‘globalisation’, a reaction to
the ideological has meant a shift from politics to self-help, sometimes
from the ideological to the intuitive, where the intuitive is taken as a flat
description of immediate reality as experience. While most feminist turns to
experience have described this immediate everyday reality as whole, pristine,
feminine, and not overdetermined by patriarchal norms, forgetting that this everyday
is actually the most powerful site for the operations of the patriarchal, the
new gender work does not necessarily rely on organicity, wholeness, or purity.
Rather, politics, or the politics of representation, have shifted, as Haraway
notes with deadly precision, to a game of simulation in what she calls the
“informatics of domination”, and the new gender work is as much part of it as
any other (recall Van Hollen’s terms – culture-in-the-making, “processural”,
etc). While none of this new critical work addressing development or technology
actually denies domination or power, it has contributed to making power so
increasingly difficult to define or identify, as to make counter-hegemonic
attempts appear very nearly anachronistic.

What, then, of alternatives? After a rejection of those feminist
strands that seek to build a common, sometimes homogenous narrative offeminine
experience, and of gender work that thrives on the heterogeneity of women’s experiences, but yet agreeing
with the need to “speak from somewhere” – through some form of attachment, as
against older models of one knowledge that offered a “view from nowhere” – a
completely detached view, what could be the nature of this critique?

We could suggest that it will have to be a re-turn to experience, rather than a turn.That we pay attention not only, or not even so much, to the
fractured narrative offered by the wide variety or heterogeneity of experience,
as to its aporeticity,[3] so as to enact such a re-turn from the perspective of the
excluded, aporetic experience as momentary resource – not authentic or
originary, but appropriate. This would mean, most importantly for a revised
notion of the political, a shift from a politics of marginality to a politics
of aporeticity.

Perspective, here, would take on the connotations of the fantastic spur
within the dominant, not as equal to
individual taste or possession of an identity, but as a moment of seeing, of
‘possession’,that may be lost in the looking. Here we might find useful, as a beginning, the model
of the excluded available within feminist standpoint theory, of the woman as
‘outsider within’ (Collins 2004).[4]While this formulation evokes a
degree of unease about whether this social location can be enough as a starting
point (whether women then always have to be the outsiders within to be able to
speak from this space), it offers, perhaps, valuable clues to work toward a
possible model of feminist critique. To understand this, we need to understand,
also, that the point here is not only of pointing to hierarchies of power, nor
is it a stand-alone system of knowledge that may be called feminist.
Perspective would be that moment of possession that not only gives a completely
different picture of things, it also gives a picture not available from anywhere
else – that makes visible the dominant as that which had rendered invalid
other possibilities.

The notion of
standpoint would be then the act of interpretation, not a place already
defined; this process involves the production of an attached model of knowledge that begins from
perspective, one that requires a speaking from somewhere.

Such a speaking from
somewhere obviously requires a conceptualization of this ‘somewhere’; in other
words, a fidelity to context. Here context is not (only) about date-time-place,
such that a concept of ‘one knowledge’ can be critiqued from a situation. It is
most importantly about relationality, the space between you and me, both
intra-community and inter-community. Once we take cognizance of this, we
realize that that space does many things – it induces a porosity of boundaries
(body, community), it creates attachment, it also creates separation. With this
in mind, we then have to talk of building a story from perspective, where it is
the turning from within outward (from
attachment to separation) that does the work of building the story. Such a
standpoint ‘is’ only in the constant
interrogation of both dominant discourse – masculinist Marxist discourse - and of the category of resistance –
feminism – within which it may be named. If this has a mutually constitutive
rather than a representative relationship with perspective, it will also mean a
separation from both old vanguardist methodologies and newer calls to
experience.

What
may be most important here is the recognition of the fantastic perspective as a
visual tool. Perspectives are made
fantastic by their positioning in an imbrication of power and meaning;
and unless the position is required to be static through any counter-hegemonic
exercise, they cannot be the source of a permanent identity, nor an alternative
system. We may present women’s experiences, then, in a different detail and
from a different perspective than as a lesson to be learnt from different
women, or indeed from an essentially feminine perspective. What we
might call the allegory of women’s lived experience serves more as a test case,
an example of the fantastic perspective that both helps provide a different
picture of the dominant, and a glimpse of other possible worlds.

Such
a fantastic perspective, moreover, would change radically our cognition of
feminism itself. Feminism as that liberatory, shade-giving
mother, that warm place of refuge, is not a workable thesis in this frame, and
the question then is – was it ever? Or is feminism that monster, that unhappy
moment of possession (not of an identity but by a vision) that grows larger and
larger, demands more and more, not simply of the dominant but of the
interrogator of the dominant? Does this not render unstable each time what had
seemed the ultimately radical, interrupt each time a consolidation of identity
under its own name, so that in response to the rhetorical question – “Who’s
afraid of feminism?” the feminist’s
answer would be – “I am”? Such a re-cognition of feminism is where we are at
today, and that might begin to inform what we call feminist knowledge.

[this section
will require more delineation, can actually be done only in the teaching
perhaps …]

Possible
exercise –

A writing up
of experiences in the class where use of alternative systems of medicine have
come up in their families, the conversations around those, and the status
accorded to them.

[1] I would suggest that the ‘then’ and
‘now’ are both in the present; put differently, there are heterogenous time frames
at work in any particular space.

[2] The “female body”, for
instance, is the site for the understandings of as well as operations of
Science (with its invisible qualifier western). In its project of defining the
form and delineating the workings of the female body, this form of knowledge
has approached the status of a value-neutral, objective method that purportedly
bases itself on solid empirical evidence to produce impartial knowledge. In the
case of the female body, it would then appear that Science has found itexclusively
and powerfully fashioned by nature to
bear and nourish children; in the event, all it is doing is putting the facts
before us.[2]

[4] FST talks of the possibility
of a situated, perspectival form of knowing, of such a knowing as necessarily a
communal project, and of this knowing as one where the community of knowers is
necessarily shifting and overlapping with other communities. While Haraway
would speak of ‘situated knowledges’ as against the ‘God trick’, as she calls
it, of seeing from nowhere – a neutral perspective (Haraway 1992), Sandra
Hardingwould go on, however, to propose a version of strong
objectivity – a less false rather than a more true view; this, Harding would
suggest, can come only from the viewpoint of particular communities, sometimes
the marginalized, sometimes women. This is where Harding’s version of
standpoint epistemology is still grappling with the question of whether the
experience of oppression is a necessary route to knowledge. (Harding deals with
this with this by treating women’s lives as resource to maximise objectivity,
Haraway by treating these women as ironic subjects, and seeing from below as
only a visual tool) A related question is whether the very notion of standpoint
epistemology requires a version, albeit a more robust one than in place now, of
systems of domination, and it is here that a productive dialogue could be begun
between Haraway’s more experimental version of “seeing from below” and
Harding’s notion of strong objectivity.